Ever since I was a little girl, I have been fascinated by the weather. When severe weather strikes, you can find me online tracking the storms and watching the coverage across the United States. I love to watch storms as they pop, fire, and start to hook around, causing that intimidating tornado warning. As long as the warning sirens around me aren’t sounding, I am all over the coverage and the radars. Recent outbreaks of the severe weather have shown me something very interesting.

Storm chasers are using their mobile devices to broadcast their chase to the local weather stations. If you like watching the weather you’ve probably stopped over at severestudios.com or chasertv.com. These are chasers who have live streaming video from their cars of the storms they are chasing. Not all storm spotters are equipped with these kinds of devices and for a meteorologist, who is broadcasting live in studio, the storm spotter is essential to knowing where the worst of the weather is located.

With mobile video conferencing becoming more widely available on devices, chasers without a partnership with a streaming website can call their local weatherman and show them what they see, as well as telling them where they are. One of the hardest things about storms is that they are unpredictable and while the National Weather Service and local meteorologists do the best they can, it’s an imperfect system. Having chasers in the field gives you an ability that wasn’t there for prediction ten years ago: Knowing exactly where a tornado is on the ground.

Radar signatures are very helpful but there is no sure fire way to say that a storm will put a tornado down at a specific location. Unfortunately, confirmation of tornados to broadcasters only comes in the form of damage reports from emergency management, and for those reporting the damage, the information is simply too late. Imagine the ability to have spotters everywhere with mobile devices, streaming as they watch the clouds roll through. Meteorologists could then see as funnel clouds form, drop to the ground, and kick up debris.

Imagine the warning you could give if you could say there was a tornado on the ground on a particular street or intersection. As someone who lives in an area that is prone to tornado touchdowns, I have to say that the use of this technology could give greater piece of mind to the public, as well as giving meteorologists a better idea of how tornados form, and what makes for great conditions for tornados.

How do you think video conferencing on mobile devices will change the way storms are predicted?